Knox Daniel - Veritas Forum and Wings of Desire

 Last month, I attended a Veritas Forum about the future of religion. While this class wasn't specifically about religion, Christianity, Judaism, and others came up many times, and spirituality in general was discussed often. This forum was really interesting; one of the panelists was Dr. Gina Zurlo, a professor at Harvard University, who shared many statistics about religion data since 1900. At that time, almost 100% of the world was religious, whereas by 1970, only 81% of the world was. This is a huge drop and can be at least partially explained by the World Wars and how they affected intellectual thought. One worldview that came out of this time was existentialism, which we talked about in relation to the film Wings of Desire. The effects of war and conflict are showcased in the film, as the Berlin wall plays a key role. I was surprised by Zurlo's prediction that the world will be 92% religious in 2050, primarily due to high birth rates in places like Africa and South Asia, where religious rates are very high. 

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